For Whom The Bell Tolls

When riding a bicycle on the roads, the most important piece of safety gear you can equip, after a helmet of course, is a rear light. When riding a bicycle off the roads, though, a bell is much more important as it helps keep at least some pedestrians from wandering directly into your path.

Most bells require manual activation though, which can make them a bit inconvenient to use. You could alternately strap on some trail bells, but those ring constantly whether you need them or not, which also isn't ideal. What you really want is a trail bell that you can switch on and off at will.

So it's a good thing they make them.

I've already equipped this bell on all of my mountain bikes, but I hesitated to add one to my gravel bike because of some mounting issues. First off, unless the bar clamp hinged open, I'd have to remove the bar tape and brake lever to even be able to put the bell on in the first place.

But the updated version solves that problem.

I'd also have to worry about the clamp being too thick such that it would interfere with the brake hoses.

But the thin section on the back of the mount takes care of that too, so long as I orient it in a slightly peculiar manner.

Thankfully the bell doesn't interfere with my garmin mount in this orientation, nor does it strike the top tube if I turn the bars too far to one side.

And the switch to turn it on and off is still conveniently accessible.

So the new model has checked all the boxes and is good to go. I am pleased.

And yes, my bike is a little bit dirty. It gets like that when I ride it off road.

Getting Canned

It's that time of year again, the time when I'm almost out of giardiniera and have to cook up a fresh new batch.

I ended up buying too many carrots. I mean I only bought four of them but they were apparently a half pound each. Since I need to cook up a batch of pot pies next week, I just set two of them aside to use for that, and also the second onion I had bought just in case I needed it (which I did not).

As you can see it looks pretty much the same as the batch I cooked up in February, although I think I used a red onion for that batch instead of the yellow onion I used this time. I don't think it made a huge difference to the actual flavour since the vinegar kind of takes center stage in this recipe.

I go through about one jar every two weeks, so I think I should be set for another good while.

It's kind of funny how I always forget how easy it is to make this. Like, you chop up the veggies, let it sit in a brine overnight, rinse them off and pack them in the jars with the spices, then fill with the pickling brine and boil them up in the canner. Hardly any work at all.

Strip Show

Who would have ever thought I'd be stripping in public? Weatherstripping, that is.

The main entry doors to the house are fairly weathertight, but there's a door leading to the furnace dungeon that isn't so much, and the furnace dungeon is open to both the attic and crawlspace.

I'm not really concerned about losing conditioned air, since this is California and the only difference between inside and outside is how much sun you get. However, I am a bit more concerned about keeping stanky crawl space air out of my house, so let's get to sealing things up.

As we can see there's no weatherstripping here currently, though I may have taken off the remnants of some back when I moved in. I recall getting rid of some here and there that was in basically useless condition, before painting the trim.

But now the weather is stripped.

The door leading out to the car hole is also notably drafty, so it's up next.

I don't want car hole stank getting in through this gap.

I'm only doing the latch side on this door, since the hinge side is pretty tight, and this door slab is a bit warped in spots. Like across the top, where there's no gap at all.

Of course, I also have only enough left of the first roll to do exactly the latch side of this door, which might also be a factor.

I'm eventually going to replace this whole door, but that can come much later. In the meantime, the gap is filled.

Or, well, mostly filled. Did I mention that the door slab is warped?

It's better than it was, at least.

I ended up using the last little strip to put on my bedroom door to keep it from rattling against the stops. Not sure yet what I'll do with the other two rolls, but I'm sure I'll figure out some use for them.

Not a Console Peasant

One of the advantages of being a member of the PC master race is that I'm not beholden to the whims of Nintendo, Microsoft or Sony if I want more performance out of my video game experience. I can upgrade my PC whenever I please.

And "whenever I please" last happened around 2013 or so. It's been a while. Let's change that.

The AMD Radeon RX-7800-XT was released about a year ago, and strikes a decent balance between price and performance. It's also available in a 2-fan formfactor which is shorter than some of the top end graphics cards. This is important for me, as my well traveled Antec Sonata case can only fit about 11 inches of graphics card, and this XFX SWFT 210 trims away all its vowels to conveniently land at about 11 inches.

I also decided to upgrade my RAM as well, partly because having 16G of RAM feels weird when I'm about to install a 16G graphics card.

Do I really need the extra RAM? No. Is it hilariously cheap? Yes.

Anyway, let's crack open the case. As we can see here, there's about 11-1/2 inches of space before we hit the drive bay mounting rails.

And getting an 11 inch card in and out of here is... a task.

I got a lot of miles out of this old card, let me tell you.

But with that cleared out of the way, there's lots of room now to get the new RAM sticks installed.

And then we get to the best part.

Oh yeah, that's worth every penny.

But this is about where I ran into a teensy, tiny little issue. You see, you remember when I said I had 11-1/2 inches of space before hitting the drive bays? Well, that's 11-1/2 inches from the back of the case, not from the IO panel, which is apparently where these cards are measured from. When measuring there, I get 11 inches even, and the old card fits with just a whisker of space to spare.

10-7/8 inches is a bit of a squeeze, but clearance is clearance.

However, remember when I said the new card is about 11 inches long? Well it turns out that it's 11-1/8 inches long, and that 3/4 of a barleycorn difference pushes things from "fits" to "not fits".

So that leaves me with a conundrum. I could buy a new case, but it's such a bother digging all the gubbins out of the old one and bolting things up to the new one, plus it's money I don't really want to spend. And well, no amount of wishful thinking, hare-brained ideas or cockamamie scheming is going to just magically make the card fit.

So that leaves me with only one logical choice: pack the card up and return it for a refund.

The thought of having to send this card back is as frustrating as it is disappointing, but part of being a mature, responsible adult is recognizing when things aren't going to plan and cutting your losses before you get in over your head.

And this is just one of those times when I'm not going to win, I just have to accept that the universe has had the last laugh and not every story has a happy ending.

Ah well, it was a beautiful dream, even if it was never meant to be.

Waterer is Wetter

As you may remember from previous blog entries, I've been in the process of tracking down and silencing some water hammer caused by my sprinkler system. Various attempts so far have yielded limited results, but in previous instalments we'll recall that I did localize the most likely source to being the water filter cartridge in my fridge.

I had repaired the original filter cap, so that it would lock into the housing as it was originally intended to, but upon closer examination...

It seems that this didn't quite go as planned. The cap is installed correctly, as is the filter, but for whatever reason it's about a quarter inch too long to engage with the housing.

It may be that the filter is too long, or it may be that the cap isn't intended to lock into the housing when a filter is installed, and instead is only meant to do so during the initial shipment before a filter is in place.

I'm really not sure what the story here is, but I do know a solution to it.

And that solution is a little folded up wedge of cardboard, shoved in next to the filter. I moved the cap upwards to get a clear photo, the filter itself isn't that far askew.

I also took the opportunity to install a new filter, since the timer in the fridge indicated it had been about a year since the last filter change.

As per usual, I forgot that changing the filter introduces a lot of air into the lines, which gets compressed when you start filling a glass, and then, when the solenoid closes, expands back to its original size.

On the bright side, the floor is clean now.

Water is Wet

So I was watering my garden the other day, and I noticed that I was getting a lot more watered than the plants were. Something was not right with my wand of moistening.

Particularly here, where the handle joins the shaft.

And as it turns out, the issue was pretty easy to track down.

That is one very cracked piece of plastic.

I initially considered ambling on down to Home Despot to drop $15 on a new one, but on a lark I decided to email Melnor's warranty support to see if they might send me a replacement handle for less than $15, so that I could keep the remains of this one out of the landfill.

Their answer?

They just sent a replacement handle for free. Sweet!

It is indeed much less broken than the old one.

And now that it's all back together, I can get back to watering the plants instead of my legs.

The Ivories Will Be Tickled

And the ebonies will be pinched.

It's time for me to pick up a new hobby (or, more accurately, dredge up an old hobby from back when I was a kid), because I clearly don't have too many of those already.

Like most kids my age, I went through a phase where my parents tried to get me to learn to play the piano. This was likely due to some now-discredited educational theories promoted by now-disgraced educational scientists who were probably just trying to peddle a thinly disguised curriculum of white supremacy to grade school children. This happens more often than you would think.

But enough about that, the piano is a lovely instrument, and this is not a piano.

It's not even an electric piano or a keyboard synthesizer, but is in fact simply a midi keyboard with 61 full-size semi-weighted keys. Apparently the exact right number to precisely span the width of my dining room table. The main difference is that this doesn't make any sound on its own, but instead must be connected to some sort of audio-generating device that turns the midi commands into actual sounds, such as a rackmount synthesizer or, more commonly these days, a laptop computer.

It also has a number of knobs, sliders, drum pads and expression rockers, because let's face it, this is basically just a giant fidget cube for ADHD kids who like to make noise.

Of course the best part of getting any new piece of tech is...

Oh yeah, that's the good stuff.

On the other hand, the worst part of getting any new piece of tech is...

Mmm, yeah. That's the world we live in, alright.

Well, let's get that out of the way.

Now modern midi controllers like this usually don't come with a sustain pedal. They're a generic device though, so you can simply pick the model that best suits your preferences and budget and tack it on to your order. I decided to go with this well-reviewed model from M-Audio.

And let me tell you, it wasn't expensive but it feels good.

It's solid and well weighted and doesn't slip around even slightly, and it's so, so much better than the square pedal that came packed in with the Yamaha electric keyboard that our family had way back in the day, which I think is this exact unit that they still try to sell you for $20 today. For comparison, I spent a whole whopping $25 on this M-Audio pedal. Well worth the extra $5.

Well, anyway, I guess there's just one thing left to do.

This is gonna take a while.